A Murder Conviction Torn Apart By A Bullet

Washington Post: In a 1995 Maryland Case, Key Testimony and the Science Behind It Have Been Discredited

(Washingtonpost.com) 
Kulbicki's wife's support and the suspicions about the science lured Drouet to take the case as part of the Maryland Office of the Public Defender Innocence Project, which files post-conviction appeals. Before becoming a public defender, Drouet, 47, served as a lawyer at the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General, where she oversaw an investigation of false testimony by one of the FBI lab's bullet-lead experts.

Soon her penchant for pursuing scientific cheating would shake up the Kulbicki case. Drouet uncovered evidence that Maryland State Police firearms expert Joseph Kopera -- the prosecution witness who had linked the off-duty revolver to the murder -- had padded his resume and lied on the witness stand about his credentials.

Kopera testified at the 1995 trial that he had an engineering degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Maryland. Drouet contacted both schools, whose registrars said that Kopera never attended their programs. A University of Maryland transcript that Kopera had submitted after he was questioned to substantiate his credentials was deemed a forgery by the school's registrar, court records show.

Confronted with the evidence, Kopera, 61, abruptly retired Feb. 28 and committed suicide a day later. His three decades of work in scores of other cases statewide is now under scrutiny by the state police.

Prosecutors conceded to the court that "Kopera misspoke regarding certain degrees he claimed to have obtained," but they argued that it was not grounds for reversing Kulbicki's conviction. "Kopera did not perjure himself at the trial, because testimony concerning his degrees was not material," they told the judge.

Drouet's sleuthing did not stop there.

She insisted on obtaining Kopera's lab notes that documented his initial examinations of Kulbicki's gun. The formal firearms reports were turned over to the defense, but the notes he used in producing those reports were not given to the defense at either trial, Drouet alleged.

The notes conflicted with nearly every major assertion that Kopera had made at trial, a review by The Washington Post found.

Prosecutors told jurors that Kulbicki killed Nueslein in his pickup truck, putting his off-duty gun to her head and firing a single shot. Part of the bullet stayed in her brain. Another fragment passed through her skull and struck the passenger-side door, leaving an indentation. That fragment landed in the back seat of the truck, prosecutors said.

Kopera had testified that the bullet fragment recovered from the victim's head and the one found in Kulbicki's truck were of a "large" caliber, at least a .38 or .40. That would make them consistent with bullets fired from Kulbicki's .38-caliber revolver.

But Kopera's examination notes told a different story. For the bullet fragment recovered from the victim's brain, Kopera declared the caliber "medium." For a second fragment recovered in the truck, he put a slash mark in the caliber field of his notes to indicate that it could not be determined.

Kopera also testified that Kulbicki's weapon was in a "cleaned condition," allowing prosecutors to suggest to jurors that the defendant had sanitized the weapon to remove any blood or gunpowder residue and to hide the fact that it had been recently fired. "It's obvious that he cleaned the gun, because there was no evidence of recently, recent firing," a prosecutor told the jury. "Well, of course not. I am -- anyone would know that if you're going to keep the gun, you should clean the gun. And he cleaned the gun."

Once again, Kopera's notes told a different story.

"Residue in barrel: Yes. Bore condition: Dirty," his notes stated, suggesting that the gun had not been cleaned.

Gun barrels are made with grooves to help bullets travel in a straight path. The barrels leave on bullets impressions known as "lands" and "grooves," which experts measure to match bullets to the guns that fired them.

Kopera testified that he could not conclusively match the markings on the bullet fragment taken from Nueslein's head to Kulbicki's off-duty Smith & Wesson revolver. But that still left open the possibility that the fragment could have come from Kulbicki's gun.

Yet when Drouet finally received Kopera's lab notes, she found that the bullet grooves on the fragment were significantly smaller than those on a bullet fired from Kulbicki's gun.

The fragment's land width was 0.072 inches and its groove width was 0.083 inches, while bullets fired from Kulbicki's gun had a land width of 0.100 inches and a groove width of 0.113 inches, the notes said.

The nearly 30 percent differences in sizes "show conclusively that the Smith & Wesson revolver found in Kulbicki's bedroom did not fire" the bullet that killed Nueslein, Drouet has told the court.

After Kopera committed suicide, prosecutors turned to a new firearms expert to examine the evidence. But his report only raised new questions about whether the markings could have come from Kulbicki's gun.

The groove markings that are impressed on fired bullets twist either to the right or the left. Kopera's 1993 exam made no mention of any twist markings on the bullet fragments, Drouet said. Likewise, the new examiner's report mentioned no twists, she said.

Drouet said that when she questioned the new firearms expert on the stand, however, he acknowledged that he had detected a "slight left twist" marking the fragment. Kulbicki's off-duty weapon makes right-twist markings, Kopera's notes say.

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